Pakistan's 'wild west' – with new Chinese port – keeps getting wilder

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See the Sol Sanders Archive By Sol Sanders SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

Increasingly all President Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s problems focus in Pakistan’s “wild west” Baluchistan province. Roughly 40 percent of Pakistan, Baluchistan has less than 10 percent of its population. And while it has rich mineral resources, its largely tribal population is improverished with the lowest literacy, health standards and poorest infrastructure among Pakistan’s four provinces.

Terrorists, apparently several varieties, are bombing infrastructure almost weekly. Quetta, the province capital, is witnessing sectarian violence and is a hangout for terrorists shuttling across the nearby Afghanistan border. There are signs Pakistan’s neighbors, Iran and India, could be fishing in the disorder. Improvised reforms are trying to satisfy local demands for more equitable wealth distribution. But the completion of its much heralded second major port at Gwadar, financed and built by China, could complicate Pakistan’s longtime, anomalous but critical, strategic alliances with both Washington and Beijing.

All of this distracts from Mushasrraf’s number one priority, settling the 50-year feud with its fellow nuclear-clad neighbor, India.

After 325 B.C., when Alexander led his army back from India to Babylon across the Makran Desert with terrible suffering and casualties, Baluchistan became a backwater. Its name derives from tribes who drifted in about 1000 A.D, apparently relatives of the Kurds further west. Another tribal group, the Brahui, established the Khanate of Kalat, about as close as Baluchistan ever got to nationhood, often subject to Arab suzerainty across the Persian Gulf. [Pakistan bought Gwadar from Oman only in 1958.]

As an outpost of Britain’s Imperial India, it became a part of Pakistan. But after brief local government, Baluch tribesmen, possibly partially Moscow-inspired, faced off the Pakistani army in the 1960s and 70s. The Shah’s Iran, eager to quell any similar uprising among its own Baluch, contributed air and personnel to Pakistani efforts which successfully bombed the locals into submission.

The present wave of violence began last year with assassination and kidnappings of Chinese engineers [one died during an American-led rescue operation]. They were working on the major ocean port at Gwadar Beijing plans to dedicate this spring. Attacks on the Sui gasfields cut off a major supply of energy for a few days earlier this year. In early February electricity was cut in Quetta. There have been rocket attacks on other infrastructure despite a growing network of military cantonments Islamabad is now building.

The violence has support from locals complaining about central government neglect and “colonialism”. That’s despite the government allotting a 300 percent increase in development programs over the last three years. The tribal patriarchal governing elite claim Punjabis [80 percent of Pakistan’s population] and other immigrants get preferential treatment. Now Musharraf’s parliamentary allies are negotiating an additional divvying up of revenues and constitutional revision for more local autonomy.

The complicated game to maintain a façade of representative government by Musharraf and his technocrat prime minister, former Citibank executive Shoukah Aziz, is precarious. The national parliamentary majority balances between moderate Moslem politicians and what embittered critics call “a king’s party” of defectors from the two major secular parties [with their leaders in exile].

Aziz’ pursuit of American aid, support from the international lending agencies, and reordering bankrupt national bureaucracies has lent verisimilitude to his efforts to resuscitate the national economy. But feeding the tiger in Baluchistan runs up against the overwhelming dominance of the powerful Punjab feudal barons in politics and their influence in the bureaucracy.

Islamabad’s determination to put down any budding insurgency was underlined by Musharraf’s blunt local TV threat to use force incomparably greater than that in the 60s. But in a faint echo of Iraq, it isn’t at all that clear who the terrorists are and how they operate. [The Chinese apparently suspect Uighur nationalist exiles who oppose Beijing’s rule in Singkiang province.] And even though Aziz is ballyhooing a gas pipeline proposal from Iran through Pakistan to India with sales to both countries [and borrowing electricity from Iran during recent shutdowns], some Islamabad sources accused the multifaced Iranian state terrorist organization. Indian sympathy for the Baluch goes back a long way, manifested in TV coverage among overseas anti-Islamabad NGOs.

Not far down the road is the question of the new Gwadar port’s use. The Pentagon is skeptical its main purpose is as a spigot for Chinese commercial operations in Central Asia, at best a long way off developing. What seems far more likely was a Pakistan quid pro quo for Chinese submarines to operate at this strategic entrance to the world’s oil lifeline originating in the Persian Gulf. Depending on the state of Washington-Beijing relations, it could become a major sticking point in efforts to stabilize relations among Pakistan, India, and the U.S.

Meanwhile, Musharraf’s Kashmir trial balloons – abandoning Islamabad’s longstanding call for a UN plebiscite, dividing up the region into demilitarized sectors, including the Kashmiris in three-way negotiations – quickly popped in New Delhi which wants continuing “confidence-building measures” babysteps. That’s giving ammunition to Musharraf’s militant Islamic dancing partners.